Season Premiere: Saturday Night Live

I had completely forgotten that tonight was the season premiere of SNL (it’s 35th year!), with Megan Fox hosting and U2 as the musical guest, but luckily the Notre Dame game ended just in time (and even more luckily, they won), so the timing just worked out. I was impressed to see a fairly healthy roster of up and comers in the opening credits. The opening monologue was pretty good (we missed most of the pre-intro skit, but I saw Conan do pretty much the same joke earlier this week on The Tonight Show, so no big loss. All in all the episode was okay, not Justin Timberlake-good by any means, but there were more skits with laughs than stinkers, I especially liked the phone sex commercial one. That was a lot of fun and damn if Fox wasn’t both good and bewitching. Her eyes are like dude tractor beams, I’m convinced.

Also fun was seeing one of those newbie cast members drop the f-bomb during the Bicker Chick Chat segment (or whatever it was called). It made an otherwise dull skit at least interesting to listen to. The whole “friggin'” thing got real old, real quick. And speaking of old, I hate U2. I know I’m one of the few people in the world that doesn’t get Bono’s inflated self importance or why such simple music has made so many people happy for so many years, but their performances were just rough, especially at the end, when Bono was swinging around on a weird, circular light-up mic/trapeze rope. Hey, I thought Pink’s performance at the VMAs was rad too, but you don’t see me putting on a shiny suit and swinging around my living room (mostly because I haven’t filmed it yet, I’m still nailing down the routine).

So, it wasn’t a perfect episode by any means, but worth not watching a movie during that time slot (I’ve got Steel Dawn and Lake Placid burning holes on my TV stand). Oh, also, the first Digital Short was pretty lame, while the second was good. So, if you’re watching them on Hulu tomorrow/today, you can skip that one.